Every word eddied from Hunt’s head. Apollion, Prince of the Pit, had called him—
Bryce leapt out of the boat and onto the shore, chest blazing with starlight. “What the Hel did you just say?”
No matter what tension or argument might lie between them, she’d go down swinging for him. Hunt jumped after her, wings steadying him as his boots hit the loose black stones. Apollion had called him son—
The Prince of the Pit swept down the stairs, his every step seeming to echo through the vast cavern. Another male in dark armor followed him, his tightly curled hair almost hidden by his war helmet.
“Thanatos,” Bryce said, drawing up short, pebbles skittering under her neon-pink sneakers.
Hunt had enough sense left in him to get to his mate’s side, but Aidas was already there, lifting a hand. “We are here to talk. There will be no violence.”
From within the ornate helm, Thanatos’s eyes blazed with murderous rage.
“Do as he says,” Apollion ordered the Prince of the Ravine, halting at the base of the temple steps.
Hunt’s lightning twined up his forearms, ready to strike as he growled at the Prince of the Pit, “What the fuck did you mean by—”
He didn’t finish his words as Aidas reached to touch Bryce’s shoulder. Acting on instinct, Hunt lunged, intending to shove the Prince of the Chasm away from his mate.
He went right through the demon prince.
Hunt stumbled and lifted his hands. His fingers shimmered faintly with a pale, bluish light. Bryce had the same aura around her.
They were ghosts here.
Apollion let out a low chuckle as Hunt backed toward Bryce’s side once more. “You will find that you cannot harm us, nor we you, in such a state.” His deep voice pealed like thunder off the walls.
Son. It wasn’t possible—
“Helena planned it that way,” Aidas said. His gaze remained fixed on Bryce while he explained, “During my time with Theia, Helena was a quiet girl, but she always listened.”
“You spoke too much,” Thanatos snapped.
Aidas ignored him. “Helena learned black salt would allow her to commune with us while protecting her mind and her soul.”
Just like the barrier of it that Bryce had sprinkled in her apartment, that day she’d summoned Aidas. When Hunt had still thought her a frivolous party girl, playing with fire.
“Fine,” Hunt cut in. “Great, we’re protected.” He eyed the Prince of the Pit. His very bones shook, but he forced himself past his fear, his dread. “What the fuck did you mean by calling me son?”
Thanatos scoffed. “You are no son of his.” He yanked off his war helmet, cradling it under an arm. “If anything, you are mine.”
Hunt’s knees buckled. “What?”
“Let us sit and be civilized about this,” Aidas said to Bryce, but she was peering into the shadows of the temple looming at the top of the steps.
“I think we’re good here,” she hedged. Hunt cleared his reeling thoughts enough to follow her line of vision.
He saw them, then. The dogs. Their milky eyes glowed from the gloom between the pillars.
“They will not harm you,” Aidas said, nodding toward the hounds that looked an awful lot like the Shepherd that Bryce and Hunt had fought in the Bone Quarter. “They are Thanatos’s companions.”
Hunt reached for his lightning, little that it could do in this insubstantial form. It zapped against his fingers, normally a familiar, comforting presence, but …
No one had ever known who had sired him. Where this lightning had come from.
“My concern exactly,” Bryce said, not taking her attention off the hounds. She nodded to Thanatos. “He eats souls—”
“The Temple of Chaos is a sacred place,” Apollion said sharply. “We shall never defile it with violence.” The words rumbled like thunder again.
Hunt sized up Apollion, then Thanatos. What the fucking fuck—
But Thanatos sniffed toward Bryce, almost as canine as the hounds in the shadows, and said, “Your starlight smells … fresher.”
The hunger lacing the male’s words stilled Hunt’s chaotic mind—honing him into a weapon primed for violence. He didn’t give a shit if he never got answers about his parentage. If that asshole made one move against Bryce, ghostly forms or no—
Bryce said nonchalantly, “New deodorant.”
“No,” Thanatos said, missing the joke entirely, “I can smell it on your spirit. I am the Prince of Souls—such things are known to me. Your power has been touched by something new.”
Bryce rolled her eyes, but for a heartbeat, Hunt wondered if Thanatos was right: Bryce had explained how the prism in the Autumn King’s office had revealed her light to now be laced with darkness, as if it had become the fading light of day, of twilight—
“We don’t have much time,” Aidas said irritably. “The dreaming draft will only last so long. Please—come into the temple.” He inclined his head in a half bow. “On my honor, no harm shall come to you.”
Hunt opened his mouth to say the Prince of the Chasm’s honor meant shit, but Bryce’s whiskey eyes assessed Aidas in a long, unhurried sweep. And then she said, “All right.”
Pushing aside every raging thought and question for the moment, Hunt kept one eye on the exit behind them as they traded the pebbled shore for the smooth temple steps. As they walked up those steps and entered a space that was a near-mirror to temples back home—indeed, its layout was identical to the last temple Hunt had stood in: Urd’s Temple.
He shut down the memory of Pippa Spetsos’s ambush, the desperate scramble for their lives. How they’d hidden behind the altar, barely escaping. In lieu of the black stone altar in the center of the temple, a bottomless pit was the main focal point. Five chairs of carved black wood encircled it.
Hunt and Bryce claimed the chairs closest to the stairs behind them—closest to the river and the boat still idling at the shore. Aidas took the one on Bryce’s other side, sitting with a smooth, feline grace. The braziers bounced their bluish light off his blond hair.
Apollion’s eyes glimmered like coals as he said to Hunt, “I am disappointed to see that you have not yet freed yourself from the black crown, Orion Athalar.”
“Someone explain what the fuck that is,” Hunt snapped. Of all the things he’d ever imagined for his life, sitting in a circle with three Princes of Hel hadn’t been anywhere on the list.
“The black crowns were collars in Hel,” Thanatos answered darkly. His powerful body seemed primed to leap across that pit to attack. Hunt monitored his every breath. “Spells, crafted by the Asteri to enslave us. They were a binding, one the Asteri adapted in their next war—upon Midgard.”
Hunt turned to Aidas. “You seemed surprised to see one on me that first time we met. Why?”
But before Aidas could begin, Apollion answered, “Because the Princes of Hel cannot be contained by the black crowns. The Asteri learned that—it was their downfall. As you were made by Hel’s princes, it should not be able to hold you.”
Made by them? By these fuckers?
Hunt had no idea what to say, what to do as everything in his life swirled and diluted, his heartbeat ratcheting up to a thunderous beat. “I—I don’t …”
“Start talking,” Bryce snapped at Apollion, scooting her chair an inch or two closer to Hunt’s. Not from fear, Hunt knew—but from solidarity. It settled something in him, soothed a jagged edge. “Hunt’s mother was an angel.”
His mother’s loving, tired face flashed before Hunt’s eyes, twisting his heart.
“She was,” Apollion said, and the way he smiled …
White rage blinded every one of Hunt’s senses. “Did you dare—”
“She was not ill used,” Aidas said, holding up an elegant hand. “We might command nightmares, but we are not monsters.”
“Explain,” Bryce ordered the demon princes, starlight rippling from her. Thanatos sniffed the air once more, savoring it, and earned a glare from Aidas. “From the beginning.”
Despite the heated words they’d exchanged earlier, Hunt had never loved her more—had never been so grateful that Urd had chosen such a loyal, fierce badass for his mate. He could trust her to get the answers they needed.
“How much do you know?” Aidas asked her. “Not just about Athalar, but about the whole history of Midgard.”
“Rigelus has a little conquest room,” Bryce said, the softness fading from her face as she crossed her arms. “He’s got a whole section about invading your planet. And I know Hel once had warring factions, but you sorted out your shit and marched as one to kick the Asteri out of Hel. A year later, you hunted them down across the stars and found them on Midgard. You fought them again, and it didn’t go well that time. You got jettisoned from Midgard and have been trying to creep back through the Northern Rift ever since.”
“Is that all?” Apollion drawled.
Bryce said warily to Aidas, “I know you loved Theia. That you fought for her.”
The Prince of the Chasm studied his long, slender hands. “I did. I continue to do so, long after her death.”
Hunt had a feeling that the darkness in the pit before them was breathing.
“Even though she was hardly any better than the Asteri?” Bryce challenged.
Aidas lifted his head. “There is no denying how Theia spent most of her existence. But there was goodness in her, Bryce Quinlan. And love. She came to regret her actions, both in her home world and on Midgard. She tried to make things right.”
“Too little, too late,” Bryce said.
“I know,” Aidas admitted. “Believe me, I know. But there is much that I regret, too.” He swallowed, the strong column of his throat working.
“What happened?” Bryce pressed. Hunt almost didn’t want to know.
Aidas sighed, the sound weighted with the passing of countless millennia. “The Asteri ordered Pelias to use the Horn to close the Northern Rift, to defend themselves against attack. He did, sealing out all the other worlds in the process, but the Horn broke before he could close it entirely on Hel. The tiniest of wedges was left in the Rift for my kind to sneak through. Helena used black salt to contact me, hoping to launch another offensive against the Asteri, but we couldn’t find a way. Unless the Rift was fully opened, we could not strike. And our numbers were so depleted that we would not have stood a chance.”
Thanatos picked up the narrative, resting his helmet on a knee. “The vampyrs and Reapers had defected to the Asteri. They betrayed us, the cowards.” From the shadows behind him, his hounds snarled, as if in agreement. “They’d been our captains and lieutenants, for the most part. Our armies were in shambles without them. We needed time to rebuild.”
“I believe Helena realized,” Aidas went on, “that the war would not be won in her lifetime. Nor by any of her sons. They had too much of their father in them. And they, too, greatly enjoyed the benefits of being in the Asteri’s favor.”
Bryce uncrossed her arms, leaning forward. “I’m sorry, but I still don’t understand why Helena built the Cave of Princes. Just to talk to you guys like long-distance pen pals?”
Aidas’s full mouth kicked up at a corner. “In a way, yes. Helena needed our counsel. But by that point, she’d also figured out what Theia had done in her last moments alive.”